Research Training Group in the Analysis of Biological Diversification

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This award will establish a Research Training Group in the Analysis of Biological Diversification. The faculty group includes members of the Departments of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Geology. The funds awarded will provide stipends for undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral trainees, and will defray part of the cost of trainee's research. In addition, funds will be used to purchase specialized research equipment to be used by trainees and to bring investigators from other research and academic institutions to the campus for seminars. University resources will augment the funds provided by NSF in most of these categories. Molecular, developmental, and population biologists, as well as systematists, ecologists and paleontologists, have developed distinctive approaches to the study of biological diversity. Owing to the way in which students have been trained traditionally, the connections among these approaches have not been explored in detail. While their individual research interests are as diverse as the list above, the faculty have formed this group with the aim of using phylogeny, which can be viewed as the history of diversification, as an approach to the integration of these disparate perspectives.